El Anatsui

Early life and training

El Anatsui was born in Anyako, in Ghana's Volta Region, in 1944. He studied at the College of Art of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, completing a degree in 1968 and a postgraduate diploma in art education in 1969.

In 1975 he joined the Department of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka. He has lived and worked in the town ever since, and taught generations of Nigerian artists there. Nsukka matters to the story: it was one of the places where post-independence artists, following the Zaria Art Society, worked out how local visual traditions could feed modern art.

Wood, clay and then metal

For his first decades as an artist, Anatsui worked mainly in wood and ceramics. He carved and scorched wooden panels and trays, often with a chainsaw and a blowtorch, and made broken and reassembled pots — forms that already dealt with fragments, memory and repair.

In the late 1990s he began working with the aluminium tops of liquor bottles. Man's Cloth and Woman's Cloth, made around 2002 and now in the British Museum, which the Art Fund helped to buy, are described as the first of his works to use bottle tops instead of wood; the tops came from liquor bottling in Ghana and Nigeria. Flattened, folded, cut and joined with copper wire, thousands of them become a single sheet that hangs like cloth. The material carries history of its own: drinks and the trade in them run through the story of West Africa's contact with Europe, and the patterns recall kente and other woven textiles.

How to look at a bottle-top cloth

Stand back first. From across a room the sheet reads as one woven cloth. Then walk up to it. Each flattened, twisted and folded top is joined to its neighbours with copper wire, and the cloth is made of thousands of them. Nothing is printed or painted: the colour is the colour of the bottle tops themselves.

Why the works look different every time

The metal sheets have no fixed shape. Anatsui lets curators and installers fold, gather and drape each piece differently for each showing, so the same work can look like a wall hanging in one museum and a crumpled landscape in the next. He has described this freedom as part of the work rather than a detail of installation.

Recognition

International attention grew quickly in the 2000s. At the 2007 Venice Biennale his metal works were hung on the facade of the Palazzo Fortuny. In 2015 the Biennale gave him the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, and in 2017 he received Japan's Praemium Imperiale.

In 2013 the Brooklyn Museum presented Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui, from February to August, the first solo show of his work at a New York museum; the exhibition was organised by the Akron Art Museum. A touring retrospective, El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale, opened at the Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2019. From October 2023 to April 2024 his Hyundai Commission Behind the Red Moon filled the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London with three monumental sculptures made from bottle tops and metal fragments. It was the eighth Hyundai Commission and his largest indoor work to date, staged in three acts that visitors move between; the first, The Red Moon, is a sail-like form that recalls the ships that crossed the Atlantic.

Where to see his work

The British Museum in London holds Man's Cloth and Woman's Cloth; the Harn Museum of Art in Florida bought Old Man's Cloth (2003) in 2005. Check whether a piece is on view before you travel. For a broader picture of where modern African art is collected, see our guide to where to see African art.

Related artists

Anatsui is often discussed alongside Ben Enwonwu, the Nigerian modernist of the generation before him, and alongside artists who transform everyday materials, such as the Ndebele painter Esther Mahlangu. His monumental public installations invite comparison with the Senegalese sculptor Ousmane Sow, and his reworking of found materials with the collage and sculpture of Wangechi Mutu. See our lists of Ghanaian artists and Nigerian artists.